Image capture triggers a focus event at the worst possible time

[Robert Hailey <cheese osndok com>]

Greetings.

-----------
THE STORY
-----------

I just bought a "Ziggi HD Plus" document camera, and am looking to
integrate it into a repetitive document scanning workflow. This device
has a hardware switch that lets you control the auto focus (manual or
continuous) and a focus-button that lets you call for a re-focus at
will.

One of my first experiments was with Cheese, but was sadly a bit of a
failure...

Even though the document is already in focus, and regardless of the
position of the hardware focus switch, whenever I press the capture
button in Cheese the device receives a call for focus and *begins* it's
multi-second focus procedure.

The problem is, Cheese (or libcheese?) does not wait for the long focus
procedure to complete, so *EVERY* image taken with Cheese is... *really*
fuzzy!

Other apps I tried don't seem to have this focusing issue, but DO seem
to have a hard time coping with the large still-image output of this
camera (3264x2448), so I'm really hoping to get Cheese working for me.

Ideally, I would like the image to instantly be captured (as refocusing
each shot would GREATLY add to the overall scan time).

The version of Cheese that I am using is that which comes with Fedora
22, specifically 3.16.1

I tried digging into the source, but did not find any obvious "focus"
commands, that I might comment them out out and rebuild.

As it was referenced in the FAQs, I tried but was unable to find
fedora's gstreamer-properties command, or I would have poked
around there too.

I understand this is probably a specifically-requested feature, but it
is interfering with my particular setup. I'm not trying to tear up
anyone's work.

-----------
THE QUESTIONS
-----------

Are there any changes post-3.16.1 that might effect this focusing
issue? I was not able to find a change log for recent versions.

Is there a non-obvious switch, environment variable, or config file
entry that could turn this feature off?

Can anyone please point me to the correct library (or file/line) that
is actually responsible for initiating this behavior?

Thank you for any help you may be able to provide.

--
Robert Hailey